repulsion
nounUS /ɹɪˈpʌlʃən/
Etymology Borrowed from Middle French répulsion, from Late Latin repulsio, repulsionem, from Latin repulsus.
1
The act of repelling or the condition of being repelled.
2
An extreme dislike of something, or hostility to something.
- All this was extraordinarily distasteful to Churchill. It was ugly, gross. Never before had he felt such repulsion when the vicar displayed his characteristic bluntness or coarseness of speech. In the present connexion[…] such talk had been distressingly out of place.1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XII, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:
3
Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Physics The repulsive force acting between bodies of the same electric charge or magnetic polarity.
- Antonyms
- attraction
- Derived terms
- chemorepulsion, Coulomb repulsion, electrorepulsion, interrepulsion, repulsion motor